The Outsider Syndrome

When people are kept away from where key decisions are made about their lives, they might put up with it so long as everything seems to work to their satisfaction.  But problems inevitably surface, and circumstances are always liable to change in unexpected ways.  Then those on the outside begin to suspect that the people with decision-making powers don’t have their interest at heart at all.

 

Convinced that their concerns are overlooked, and their views persistently ignored, many end up developing the Outsider Syndrome.  First of all, they lump everyone with political authority together as the untrustworthy ‘establishment’.  It does not matter how misleading such sweeping generalisations can be, they refuse to differentiate politicians and public officials who are dedicated to helping the people from those who are corrupt, self-centred, or idle.  If they hear that one politician has done something bad, they blame all politicians regardless of the good many politicians have done.  They say none can be trusted, and all those in positions of authority must be treated with disdain.

 

Next, they start to exhibit one of two possible symptoms.  They are either consumed by a cynical apathy which leads them to think only about themselves and dismiss the common good as illusory, or fired up by an iconoclastic fury that wants to get rid of what is in place and replace it by some glowing beacon of a ‘great new era’.

 

Finally, they play their part – through abstaining from the electoral process, or giving their support to some supreme ‘outsider’ who will turn everything upside, give back ‘control’ to the people, and make their country ‘great’ again.  We have seen how this works out with a variety of ‘populist’ surge.  

 

The Outsider Syndrome is symptomatic of a malfunctioning democracy becoming ever more vulnerable to falling under arbitrary rule.  It cannot be dealt with by giving a few who were left outside the ‘political mobility’ to gain political office, for the wider problem of civic exclusion would remain for others.  The only way to overcome it is by means of bridge-building – connecting people with their own governance.

 

Apart from improving electoral processes so people have more a chance to assess candidates and make their votes count in a more proportionate manner, there are many ways to displace the insider/outsider barrier with sustained cooperative interactions.  For example, more decisions can be passed to multi-stakeholder cooperatives to make via inclusive arrangements; more issues can be considered and resolved by either all those affected through deliberative engagement (such as Planning for Real, Participatory Budgeting, or community conference), or a randomly selected jury-like group , whose views are communicated to others; and a systematic rotation of holders for public office can over time give everyone a chance to experience the power and responsibility of having statutory authority.

 

Evidence reviewed in the book, Whose Government is it? the renewal of state-citizen cooperation, shows that people can have a meaningful role in governing themselves if the appropriate techniques and support are put in place.  We need to act on that evidence more urgently than ever.